To ask what should be being done about the economy and the country generally

[AlertCat]

I’m fairly Keynesian in my economics (I’m not an economist) but there are so many problems in society at the moment that I’m not sure even a massive programme of work like in the 1950s would really help.
There’s another thread where people are expressing unhappiness at the levels of tax they’re being asked to pay and it’s easy to find lots of threads about benefit claimants and immigration.

If we take as given that (a) our birthrate means we need immigration; (b) we have a benefits system that’s both overly punitive and (apparently) overly lenient if you say the right things (I’m not sure I personally believe the second part, but it’s an opinion I see a lot); (c) climate change means more and more people from the global south moving north; (d) the days of good state services, free at the point of use may be over-

what would you do differently to the government? Could we get back to the kind of services provision we had in the post-war consensus era (up until the Thatcher government)? Is that a pipe dream? Is it even desirable?

I’m sorry, @Rockhopper1 but the evidence just doesn’t agree with you. There’s a good reason why no other country in the world is copying the NHS system: the expense: outcome ratio is terrible. It’s hugely expensive - increasingly simply unaffordable - and low quality, with terrible patient outcomes and survival rates and quality of care if you look at international comparisons. This has always been true but got even worse over recent years. It isn’t sustainable, and again it’s an enormous drain on tax revenues that are needed desperately to save the country from the spiral of declining living standards.

There are perfectly humane and acceptable systems in many other countries like France and Germany and Australia that cost a similar percentage of GDP, ensure the poorest always have access to heathcare, and ensure far more timely and high quality treatment, better survival rates and better patient outcomes. The NHS is a terrible system and it has to be changed.

I’m sorry to hear what happened to your MIL. That’s awful. I think it’s most people’s biggest fear to be alone, old and scared.

I am also very much in favour of voluntary euthanasia. I can’t understand how we can be more compassionate to pets than to human members of our family, and deny people’s agency and choice over their own lives and force them to suffer unnecessarily. If people saw the reality of the worst deaths that are forced on some unfortunate people due to these policies and were forced to witness it, I believe they’d change their minds about giving people choices. It’s cruel in the extreme and when my own time comes, I want to have the choice to end it.

I hope the expert on tidal energy expert pops up! I hadn’t seen that thread but always interested to learn more about many topics (jack of all trades!) so I’ll search and see if I can find it and read it. I am by no means an expert on this stuff at all regarding energy: I’ve only looked carefully at the policy aspects and pricing issues and expected timescales in technological development from an economic perspective, so only aware to the extent I need to be for a high-level overview from an economic strategy point of view and definitely don’t pretend to be a scientist knowing all of the ins and outs of the technical feasibility for implementing the various technologies and making them commercially viable and would be very interested to her his/ her thoughts.

It is so interesting to hear from experts who know huge amounts about topics as sometimes happens when Mumsnet is at its best, so I hope the person you’re referring to appears!

@InPraiseOfIdlenessI’m usually quite positive but what you outline in your posts is indeed concerning.

I really hate it that whenever anybody talks about reforming the UK healthcare system everybody gives the example of the US.

Nobody’s suggesting copying them.

The two systems on Earth that nobody is interested in copying are the UK system and the US system, the two extremes.

Neither of them work.

There are multiple, sensible, fiscally affordable and far more effective systems with far better patient outcomes for a similar percentage of GDP. Like those in most of northern Europe, Canada and Australia. Copying any one of those would vastly increase our level of health as a nation, make patient experience much better, cost a similar amount of national income, and ensure that the poorest of course still had access to free healthcare if they could not pay anything.

It’s ridiculous propaganda when people try to pretend that if we change the absurd NHS system into something that actually works the only other option is a system like the US. Nobody would ever emulate that because it’s just as bad as our own, and even more expensive.

When I really let myself think about the future I find it quite terrifying. Not for me, but for my children and any children they may have. It’s hard to see how humanity will come together (as it must) to overcome what lies ahead if it can’t even solve the very basic and far more easily solvable problems that exist now.

Cheerful thoughts!

yes @InPraiseOfIdleness it shows how reduced the level of ‘debate’ on social media is, that politicians parrot for headlines, about the level of a debate of a class of students in the upper end of primary school. In fact…perhaps cbbc has done more insightful stuff than a lot of tweets…

Also the taxing billionaires thing - we need international agreement on taxing billionaires, their companies etc - another thing there is little reality about. Ditto wealth taxes - I’m interested in the idea but there are very few successful ones that have raised much.

It is really hard to tax the cleverest wealthiest people in the world appropriately, until you tax spending. Buy a van Gogh,for £10 or £50m quid. I don't really care much (although I'd like to see it) but if the purchase went though your bank account, then I would prefer to know that the transaction was visible for tax purposes in your domiciled tax reporting terrritory and visible worldwide.

That’s the entire problem. There’s no way to tax these people on their wealth without international cooperation from pretty much every country, and that simply will not happen. It’s wrong, morally, but there’s no point wasting time on it because it’s not viable and it not possible to implement.

The best that can be done is to at least change the tax rules within the UK so that a smaller share of annual national income can be extracted by the already wealthy per my post earlier on this (in terms of amending the rules around transfer pricing, private equity, dividend payments etc). This would not penalise anybody running a business in an ethical manner (which of course, by definition, involves making profits!) so wouldn’t discourage economic activity except from those who with to try to strip assets rather than build and grow businesses. And should be done alongside creating favourable trading conditions i.e. removing the current ridiculous self-imposed trade barriers of Brexit and creating a much more favourable environment for small and medium-sized businesses with start-up grants, linked to research in universities, clusters focused on specific industries, tax breaks for genuine R&D, more protection from buyouts, a cohesive business administration and export function to do all of the paperwork and legal work for this cheaply for smaller companies to avoid duplication and wasted resources and encourage them to grow, subsidies for taking on apprentices, etc.

Absolutely this. It is a very depressing state of affairs.

It is history repeating itself: the same patterns over and over again and nobody ever learns, nobody cares about the big picture, everyone just wants to squabble over minor things. The realities are staring everyone in the face and predictably 99% of people are ignoring it and carrying on like everything’s fine.

It won’t be. Not this time, not unless people actually start challenging their politicians for genuine change rather than moaning about relatively minor issues, and at least demand that their Government ensures the very basics of proper food, water and energy security. It’ll be no good waiting until these problems hit the fan: much too late by then.

In the meantime, if that was in hand and happening (the basics to survive), we should be getting a grip on healthcare, pensions, education and defence (moving a lot of money from the former two to the latter two).

I suspect, though, that I’m wasting my valuable time off shouting into the wind so I should probably give up and just enjoy a bit of sunshine tomorrow and rest for once. ☀️

It won’t really help. Over 20% of young people are leaving secondary school with a reading age of 9 or under.

Until we start educating our population properly then democracy cannot function because a badly educated electorate is easy to manipulate with pointless slogans and votes based on their feelings rather than rational assessment of likely outcomes.

This suits those running the pseudo-democracy just fine.

There’s a reason why economics isn’t taught in school as part of the national curriculum, and why education is so underfunded.

I’d tax very high earners far more.

🤦🏻‍♀️

Governments have to play with the cards they are dealt, but they also determine the next round of cards to be dealt. That means they can’t always have what they want.

This government wants to spend more money than it currently receives by some order of magnitude. I don’t blame them for that and I have no doubt they would do lots of lovely things with the money, but the U.K. economy isn’t big enough or rich enough for that. We are borrowing to service debt. Any attempt to increase taxation further will not increase revenue because it will shrink the economy. We are already over the peak of the Laffer curve. Instead, our government needs to decide what its spending priorities are and deliver on those. That means cutting elsewhere, even if that’s painful or requires legal changes.

Even as someone high-earning and childless...we need to give huge tax incentives to encourage and support people in having larger families, which will require significant redistribution of wealth.

Although we shouldn't infringe on the free press, I do think there should be mandatory, front and centre disclosure on all for-profit news publications and channels as to who owns them. The right wing press are one of the most corrosive factors in western democracies.

Obviously this is completely impossible as we can't go backwards but:

*get rid of AI
*get rid of the machines/technology that used to be people's jobs
*maybe even get rid of the internet
*make life massively more simple and localised

Huge downsides to that, of course. But I think it would also bring huge social and economic benefits.

I think it might bring a return to a higher birth rate and a lower life expectancy. Which are not necessarily good things in themselves but are proabably good for the economy.

It can be misleading to compare each country's healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP. GDP varies enormously. Look at the per capita figures to see the average amount spent per person. The UK spends less than many other Western countries.
Average annual health spending. US dollars (PPP) per person. OECD countries and more - List of countries by total health expenditure per capita - Wikipedia

Thankyou for posting that. I was sure that most European countries spend more on healthcare than the UK.

I disagree. My mother who is approaching 80 and all her friends and everyone I know of around that age (a few neighbours for example) are very much hoping real headway will be made in voluntary euthanasia before they get to spend years with no quality of life in a care home or.similar. I feel the same for myself actually.

This is why I was hopeful about Reeves because she does have an economics background and she kept saying prior to the election that she understood that the priority must be generating growth. Without growth and productivity increases you cannot tax more, otherwise you just disincentivise work even more, it’s just redistributing the crumbs. You generate growth, then you can tax it (if you are the type of Government that believes in a bigger state, as clearly given her party she does, which is fine), but you have to have something to tax in the first place, otherwise you just crush the economy and then you are trying to extract higher taxes from an ever shrinking pile of cake crumbs.

I thought she was intelligent enough that she’d understood this fact. You generate the growth, then - when living standards have risen and people have had real-terms salary rises for the first time in two decades - people will not mind so much if you want to take an extra 1 or 2 or 3% of what they’re earning if they are 10% richer than before. But the growth is a prerequisite.

She said all of this, we believed her. We were wrong.

We swapped one bunch of total incompetents for another.

And based on the latest polling a significant proportion of the electorate is so unfathomably stupid that they think that Reform would be better, when it’s blatantly obvious they’d be even worse (yes, it is possible).

It’s so depressing that there has been not one sensible manifesto from any political party in the UK that is worthy of a vote for over two decades now.

When I say “we believed her”, I meant the business community and population in general, just to clarify. I’m not saying that I voted for Labour. I did not. There was nobody I could bring myself to vote for in the last election because there wasn’t a single option that was not a total shambles of either blatant lies or economic fantasy.

UK PPP has fallen immensely in recent years (don’t ask this Government or the last Government or the Brexit voters why, you’ll set them off) so that is also quite a misleading comparison. Of course, in general, on a PPP basis a poorer country with a weaker currency and lower salaries will spend less per person on healthcare. That’s not a way to measure the effectiveness of the system, especially not if you’re not also comparing it as a ratio to some measure of outcomes.

If I had the money I’d quite like to go and live on a tropical island away from everyone. I could declare my island an independent country and it would have the cheapest healthcare system on a PPP basis of any country in the world because it would cost £0 per person, because there would be no healthcare system at all. Would that make it the best system? If I fell out of a coconut tree and broke my leg it probably wouldn’t be brilliant for me. Without the outcomes also measured it’s meaningless.

The NHS DID work extremely well , with optimal outcomes for many years , until it was chopped up and privatised behind the scenes . We ARE moving over to a US model of delivering healthcare by stealth however much people might suggest they would LIKE a European model , that isn’t what is being proposed or negotiated with American healthcare companies.
For example GPs ( which fall out of the remit of the NHS proper ) are being taken over by US healthcare companies in many regions .
US health insurance giant, Centene, through its UK subsidiary, Operose Health, has been taking over GP surgeries and practices in London and across the country for many years.
Centene has taken over AT Medics, a primary care provider responsible for 49 GP surgeries and over 370,000 patients in the Greater London area.
With a total of 70 GP surgeries and practices, Centene is almost certainly the largest single provider of NHS primary care in England.
Even the Daily Mail has called Centene a ‘ profit greedy company . ‘
I would dearly like the Labour government to repeal the Health & Social Care Act (2012 ) & allow our taxes to go straight back into delivering healthcare directly through the NHS .

I would dearly like the Labour government to repeal the Health & Social Care Act (2012 ) & allow our taxes to go straight back into delivering healthcare directly through the NHS .

Oh, me too. That was the most appallingly wasteful piece of legislation of my lifetime.

GP surgeries aren’t part of the NHS and never have been. They are private practices that have contracts with the NHS where they are paid a fee by the Government (a shockingly small fee, actually) per patient on their books per year.

GP practices are run as partnerships, as businesses, already, with some more junior GPs as employees (along with admin staff) and other GPs as partners in the business.

Obviously it isn’t good if these partnerships are being sold off to companies and US healthcare companies are best kept well away from anything to do with UK healthcare but GP practices were always private businesses and have never been otherwise.

Perhaps people should ask the Government what they’re doing about that in terms of negotiating this trade deal they’re desperate for with the US, which at best might raise GDP 0.2% over many years, compared with the 4-5% of GDP that we’re missing every year as a result of Brexit (4% per the OBR and 5% per Goldman Sachs’ most recent assessment).